A Bangkok exporter booking a container to Laem Chabang is usually offered two places to deliver it: the port itself, or Lat Krabang ICD on the eastern edge of Bangkok. It is tempting to treat this as a question of distance. It is not. The container reaches the same ship either way. What changes is where your truck's part of the journey ends, and who pays for the rest.
Get that choice right and one truck can do two jobs a day instead of one. Get it wrong and you pay handling charges and give up a day of cut-off time to save kilometres that were never the expensive part.
What an ICD actually is
An inland container depot is a container yard away from the sea that works like a port gate. Loaded export boxes are received there, customs formalities are done there, empty boxes are released and returned there, and the boxes then travel to the port on the depot's own link. At Lat Krabang that link is a dedicated rail shuttle, plus trucks.
The depot is not one yard. It is a set of modules, each run by its own operator under its own published tariff. That matters in practice, because the rules at your gate are the rules of the module your shipping line uses, not a single Lat Krabang rule. One operator's module, for example, takes dry containers only and turns away 45 foot high cubes and special equipment. A reefer, a flat rack or an out-of-gauge load may have no ICD option at all.
Three things move when the gate moves
Choosing the ICD does more than shorten the truck leg.
- Your truck's day gets shorter. The ICD is roughly 98 km short of the port. A carrier's own planning guide allows 4 to 6 hours for a truck between the two. Take that leg out of a round trip and the same tractor and driver may fit a second job into the day.
- Handling charges appear on your side. The ICD bills the party that brings the box in. A published tariff is the only way to see what that costs, and it is shown below.
- The clocks start earlier. Free time on the container starts at gate-in at the depot, not at the port, so the rail or road leg to the ship runs inside your demurrage allowance. Some lines also accept less weight in a box at Lat Krabang than at the port. Both catch people who planned to the port's rules.
What the ICD charges for one export box
Evergreen's Lat Krabang tariff lists the charges for a full export container arriving by trailer. Here they are added up.
| Charge at the gate | 20 foot (baht) | 40 foot (baht) |
|---|---|---|
| FCL lift off | 500 | 900 |
| Facility service charge | 500 | 1,000 |
| Gate charge, 18-wheel trailer | 150 | 150 |
| Fuel gate surcharge | 100 | 200 |
| Weight charge | 32.71 | 32.71 |
| Goods control list, per container | 50 | 50 |
| Total | 1,332.71 | 2,332.71 |
ESCO's Module B sheet has the same 500 and 900 baht lift off, so the core charge is not one operator's quirk. The tariffs are not identical on the rest, though. On the import side both publish 1,550 and 2,650 baht to lift a full box onto your truck, but for returning an empty box one charges 500 and 800 and the other 400 and 680. Read the sheet of the module your line actually uses.
Two cautions before using the total. First, driving straight to the port is not free of gate charges either, so net out whatever the port terminal bills your haulier. Second, ask your line whether its Lat Krabang terminal handling charge differs from its Laem Chabang one, and who pays for the shuttle to the ship. On many bookings the line moves the box to the port as part of its own service. On others it appears as a separate line. That one answer can decide the whole comparison.
What the ICD saves: turns, not kilometres
The saving on the truck side comes from how many boxes one truck-day can deliver, not from the distance. A day rate divided by jobs per day gives the truck cost per box. Fewer kilometres only matter if they add a job to the day.
Take a round figure of 10,000 baht for one tractor, trailer and driver for a day. This is a number to make the arithmetic visible, not a market rate. Put your own in.
| Your factory | Boxes a day, to the port | Boxes a day, to the ICD | Truck saving per box | ICD handling, 40 foot | Better route, 40 foot |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Port round trip fills the day | 1 | 2 | 5,000 | 2,332.71 | ICD, by 2,667.29 |
| Port allows two turns, ICD three | 2 | 3 | 1,666.67 | 2,332.71 | Port, by 666.04 |
| ICD saves distance but no turn | 1 | 1 | Fuel and tolls only | 2,332.71 | Usually the port |
The middle row flips with box size. On a 20 foot container the same saving of 1,666.67 baht beats handling of 1,332.71, so the ICD wins by 333.96 baht a box. The same factory can have a right answer for 20 foot boxes and the opposite answer for 40 foot ones.
The legal limit on a driver's day decides how many turns fit, not the map. That is why a long port run can take a full day without much distance. Count turns from your own dispatch records, including the time spent queueing at both gates.
What the ICD costs in time
The rail shuttle looks fast on paper. The State Railway's timetable runs fifteen trains each way a day, one every 90 minutes, taking 2 hours 45 minutes from the depot to the port.
The measured reality is slower, and it is the number to plan with. A 2024 study of empty boxes moved between the two in 2021 and 2022 found the run itself averaged 2.30 hours. The wait before the train left averaged 16.13 hours, and handling another 4.02, for 22.45 hours in all. The same boxes averaged under five hours a trip by road. The train carries up to 64 TEU, so it runs when it is worth running, and the box waits for the train. A carrier's own planning figure of 10 to 12 hours by rail sits between the timetable and the study.
The delays were spread across the chain. The people interviewed put 36% of the problems in transport, 35% in terminal operations and 29% in customs procedure. At the port end, rail boxes arrive at a dedicated rail terminal with six tracks and a 28,000 TEU yard, and still have to be moved on to the berth.
For an exporter this means one thing. The ICD's closing time for your vessel is earlier than the port's, by the length of that chain. Ask your line for the Lat Krabang cut-off in writing. Do not work it out backwards from the port cut-off using the timetable.
When Lat Krabang is the better answer
The ICD tends to win when all of these hold:
- It adds a truck turn. Your factory is on the Bangkok side, so the port round trip eats the day and the ICD round trip does not.
- The box is standard. Dry, not a 45 foot high cube or special equipment, and within the module's weight limit.
- The cargo is ready early. Loaded at least a day ahead of the port cut-off, so the rail wait does not become a missed ship.
- The empty is there too. Your line releases empty boxes at Lat Krabang, so the empty leg is short as well.
- Free time covers it. Your free time can absorb the inland leg without tipping into demurrage.
Driving straight to the port tends to win when any of these hold:
- the factory is already east of Lat Krabang, where the depot is a detour
- the cargo is late
- the load is heavy
- the box is a reefer or special equipment
- the port run already fits two turns a day and the box is a 40 foot
What to do before the next booking
- Count turns, not kilometres. From last month's dispatch records, find how many boxes one truck-day actually delivered to each place, including gate queues.
- Get the tariff sheet of your line's module and add up the charges for a full box in, as in the table above.
- Ask your line four questions in writing: the Lat Krabang cut-off for your usual vessel, the terminal handling charge at each location, whether the shuttle to the port is included, and the weight limit at the depot.
- Run the break-even per box size. The ICD wins when your truck cost per box to the port, minus your truck cost per box to the ICD, is more than the ICD handling plus anything extra the line bills.
- Write the rule into your booking process: which box sizes and which factories go to which gate. Then the choice is not made again, differently, by whoever books the truck that day.
The route that looks shorter on the map is often not the cheaper one, and the one that looks longer sometimes is. Everything that decides it is on a published tariff, a timetable, or your own dispatch log.